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Tag Archives: Election 2016

WE ARE NOT SORE LOSERSThis isn’t about being bad losers. We are in revolt because our country is now in the hands of an intellectually disinterested, reckless, mendacious narcissist. If this doesn’t terrify you, you’re a fool.WE ARE RESISTING TYRANNY

I found this in my FB feed and it’s just so, so… so very. What’s the word I’m looking for? Wait, it’ll come to me.

The Format: There’s nothing about this video which needed to be animated; nothing in particular is emphasized by the animation, and all of the text fits into the given format size. It’s essentially a meme-GIF gussied up for no apparent reason.

The Music: You’ll have to clickthrough the hyperlink to hear it; WordPress won’t let me attach an MP4 so I had to convert it to a GIF. Spare yourself: it’s goofy and dumb. It’s almost as if the music was chosen to contrast and undercut the message. I’m guessing “Yackety Sax” was too obvious.

The Message: Let’s fisk it.

1) “WE ARE NOT SORE LOSERS” (in all caps) “This isn’t about being bad losers.” Yeah, actually, it is in substantial measure about that, and they most certainly are bad, sore losers. When candidate Trump cast doubt on the integrity of the vote he was assailed by Leftist Democrats as not merely wrong, but he was accused of undercutting the very underpinnings of the democratic process. Within weeks it was the Leftist Democrats who were throwing shade at the integrity of the vote on flimsy pretenses without a hint of shame at their own hypocrisy.
The Russian “hacking” of the election? Nonsense. There’s no clear evidence that the Russians hacked into the DNC. The hacking tool (see GRIZZLY STEPPE) used to break into the DNC is for sale on the black market. What the Russians certainly did was to spread “fake news”, to dubious effect. The hacking, in this context, refers to the leaked emails of the DNC, and if Julian Assange is to be believed the trove WikiLeaks published came from a disgruntled Bernie Sanders supporter. Assange is not trustworthy but it’s a completely plausible story, considering that the emails revealed the DNC to be colluding with the Clinton campaign to lock Sanders out of the primary. Even if it were the Russians who hacked the DNC, what happened was a revealing of truth, not disinformation. So let’s be clear about this: What the Democrats are upset about is the revealing of truth – not truth related to our safety and national security, but political truth and the dirty politics of the DNC.
The Comey backstabbing? Nonsense. FBI Director James Comey revealed days before the vote that the investigation into the Clinton emails had been re-opened due to the discovery of a new trove of thousands of emails on disgraced Anthony Weiners laptop. Essentially, the position appears to be that the truth of the status of the investigation should have been kept secret, as it was during the months summer months when Clinton insisted that the investigation was nothing more than a “security review”. In fact, Comey betrayed the American people by failing to press charges against Clinton and her staff despite unambiguously clear multiple violations of Federal law. Once again: What Democrats are upset about is the revealing of truth. As for the allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians, we have Dianne Feinstein (D), who’s on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and assures us that there’s no evidence of that.

2) “We are in revolt because …” Whoa, let’s stop right there. They certainly are revolting but not in the sense that they are “in revolt” by any stretch of the imagination. Leftists have a long-standing love affair with “revolution” and they love to associate themselves with it. It’s self-aggrandizing, counter-establishment, and in their minds, flattering. When Leftists declare they are “in revolt” they are echoing the battle-cry of Leftists from decades past, but they are not, in fact, “in revolt”. They are just complaining like the sore losers that they are.

3) “… our country is now in the hands of an intellectually disinterested, reckless, mendacious narcissist.” Well, to be fair, that’s true enough. The problem Leftists have is that it’s the other guy who won. Their candidate fits that description too, and is, by far, the most corrupt politician I have seen in my lifetime, and I remember ABSCAM when congressmen were literally taking a bribe in the form of a suitcase full of cash. There’s also the matter of her sense of entitlement to the presidency, her disparagements of the other side, her willful disregard for the our national security secrets, her massive influence-peddling, and so on. Clinton was a deeply, deeply flawed candidate/criminal, so much so that despite at least a two-to-one spending advantage her team couldn’t beat Donald Trump, the biggest clown running for the presidency I have seen in my lifetime, and I remember – wait, no, I don’t want to start clown-ranking past presidential candidates. That’s beyond the scope of a blogpost. So: He’s the biggest clown. Trust me. The biggest. Yuuuuge clown.

4) “If this doesn’t terrify you, you’re a fool.” Idiot Leftists are equal measures stupidity, ignorance, and smug arrogance, supported by a foundation of fear and violent anger, all of which they project onto their political opposition. Socialists are shameless in their support of an ideology which has killed tens of millions, and the terrifying disasters which are the direct result of their ideology put into practice teach them no lessons in failure, but really, if you aren’t terrified of Trump, you’re a fool. None of the dumbasses who liked or shared this have actually acted in any meaningful way to protect themselves or their loved ones from this terror, but supposedly: terror.

5) “WE ARE RESISTING TYRANNY” (again, all caps). No they are not. I’ve heard this word, “resist”, thrown around a lot by these Leftists, but no, they’re not resisting. What does it mean to resist, to be in this resistance? Are they smuggling refugees out of the country to freedom and safety? Are they smuggling news, supplies, weapons, anything to the victims trapped inside, or the their fellow revolutionary resisters? Are they carrying out missions of sabotage or assassination? No, none of it. So what are they doing? complaining is what; complaining like the sore losers that they are. And in what way does the Trump Administration manifest “tyranny”? We know what tyranny looks like. We have real-life current-day examples of tyranny: China, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela; and the farther left a government goes the more tyrannical it becomes. Socialism is the road to tyranny (or serfdom, for you Hayekian purists) and these pathetic Leftists are so clueless as to call themselves Antifa.

Ah! there’s the word I’ve been looking for:

Pathetic.

Addendum: While writing this post I googled “Define sore loser”, and here’s what Google came up with:

In what cannot in any possible way be interpreted as a partisan political message, when I Googled “Define sore loser” and I got a picture of James Comey.

After their 2016 election loss Democrat supporters took to the streets and marched – and rioted. That riot part was downplayed by the MSM as “protests” – here’s a clue for them: when protesters break store windows, smash cars, set fires, and beat people up, it is called a riot and they are called rioters.

The Democratic National Committee has seen this too and they’re doing their part – to keep it going. Here’s my inbox from the last couple of days:

Yes, the DNC would like you to start fighting back. “Fight” is the operative word here. See also this email about a sticker they’d like you to put on your car; and what’s the operative word here?

Yes, FIGHT. With Liberal defiance, fear, and violence run amok the DNC would like all of their supporters to do what? FIGHT.

Bradley Smith has a piece in the Washington Examiner (“Kill the ‘money buys elections’ cliche” – 2016-11-14) in which he points out that in the 2016 election cycle Clinton outspent Trump two-to-one, and of “independent” groups the Clinton side outspent the Trump side by three-to-one. These are not marginal differences, they are huge and unprecedented; you can’t look at that difference and say that it’s within any kind of margin of ineptitude. That is to say, it’s not like you can argue that the “true” amounts spent were close because a significant portion of the Clinton cash was spent on stupid things (ex., “That $20M for skywriting over North Dakota? It seemed like a good idea at the time!”).

In his piece Smith makes the case that the “money buys elections” cliche is dead. I’d argue that it isn’t, mostly because, despite the clear-cut example presented by this election, partisans will use whatever argument might work regardless. Also, money can still buy elections under different circumstances – a candidate who has virtually no budget will probably lose vs. an opponent who has even a modest bankroll, or when all the candidates are not already well-known to the voters. Money still counts.

One thing I found remarkable in this cycle was the absence of the usual Liberal hair-pulling over “Campaign Finance Reform”. Obama outspent both McCain and Romney but the margin was tight enough that Liberals could still pretend they were the underfunded underdogs and decry the way the Right was buying the election. With the disparity as great as it was in this cycle that would no longer pass the laugh test, and that’s why we didn’t hear anything about it. Not in the WaPo, not in the NYTimes, not on CNN, not in the MSM; not on NPR; not on the Liberal blogs. Where were the Kos Kids or HuffPo? Thinkprogress? Anyone? Did the Liberal “watchdog” groups so much as snarl?

This is another example of the Liberal “Pretext of Principles“. The disparity in money spent has never been greater, in terms of the ratio or in terms of absolute dollars spent, by the campaign or its supporters, and Liberals didn’t and don’t mind at all because it benefited their side. Their principle that money corrupts the democratic process may or may not be true, but whether it’s troubling to Liberals is entirely conditional on whether or not they are the beneficiaries of the disparity. As a corollary, the same goes for big money donors; for Liberals, if Wall Street or Big Pharma or whatever deep-pockets pays their side, that may be notable but it’s not bad – and it’s not necessarily notable either.

It’s not true that the front runners of the two parties are the scrapings from the bottom of the barrel; I can think of worse candidates with national recognition. Nevertheless, these are the front runners and I… I have reservations. I have concerns. I sometimes wake up screaming obscenities.

What’s with this trainwreck of the Democrat field? I think it’s this: Clinton wields great power over the party and that helps explain why there are precious few who would oppose her nomination despite her many obvious liabilities. Although the Clinton Foundation has served to launder bribes it’s got the advantage of having the willful blindness of liberals to shield themselves from acknowledging her rampant corruption, and a light-touch liberal MSM to note that corruption with a sense of unanswered curiosity, as if to say, “Hmm, isn’t that odd, how about that, huh?”

Without ABSCAM-style suitcases full of cash in exchange for explicit favors liberals would always counter that “You Can’t Prove Anything!”, although the timing of some of these donations can be correlated with favorable outcomes explicitly or implicitly granted by Clintons or their minions. That’s evidence enough to get most people put in jail, but they’re not most people, are they? They’re powerful, connected, protected. Which gets you to how you can give a private speech to Goldman-Sachs for $225K and still run for POTUS without being hounded by the press or run out of town on a rail.

The matter of the private email server, and the classified information therein, well, that’s another matter. That’s a criminal matter. And there’s no way around it. The law is clear. The evidence is indisputable. The crimes are numerous and the penalties for those crimes involve incarceration.

This helps explain the rise of Sanders. He’s far enough outside the circle of power brokers in the party that he’s willing to compete for the nomination. As such he’s the only credible alternative to Clinton for the nomination despite his many electability issues. Issues like, for example, his being a Marxist, and as such having demonstrated his blithering idiocy and ignorance of economics. Oh, there’s more, plenty more which make him an otherwise unlikely choice for the Democrat nomination but Clinton is repugnant enough to liberals that many prefer him to her. They’ll hold their nose and vote for her if they have to, then go to the bathroom to retch, but better either one of them than a (*shudder*) Republican. I could be wrong about that, though. They might end up voting for her in the general election with their heads held high. Either way, they’ll vote for whatever yellow dog gets the ticket.

On the other side of the aisle we have Trump, although I’m unconvinced that he has any business being on the other side, what with his close associations and donations to the Democrats. There’s anger, even outrage from the Republican base at the Republican leadership for their ineffectual fecklessness, and it’s deserved. They talk tough then cut deals which are indistinguishable from capitulation.

Still, how Trump came to be the alternative to inside-the-beltway Republicans is a unfathomable. To me, at least. Leaving aside the outstanding alternatives like Cruz or Rubio (and you’ll note that I’ve characterized them as “outstanding” and not “perfect”), the fact is that Trump is a boorish buffoon who has no business in the White House; not even as a guest.

It’s not like the pollsters are being trolled; Trump has actual turnout at rallies – and they cheer him. If there’s a ray of hope it’s this: we have yet to see him win a primary, although that may only be because there haven’t been any primaries. So, it may be that pollsters are being trolled, that the liberal MSM is hyping the worst alternative, and that people will come to their senses when they cast their ballots.

If I had a god I would pray that it be so. I would give prayers. Offerings too, I can do offerings! An unblemished year old lamb, male or female, perhaps a ram? Let’s talk turkey.

So I got this email from Bernie Sanders, and … OK, that deserves an explanation, so I’ll back up.

I’m on the DNC and Democrat candidate-contender email lists for this election cycle. I find it interesting to see their tactics and read their talking points. For a party that prides itself on intellectual acumen it’s remarkable how often and relentlessly these emails target the uninformed and simple-minded, but perhaps that’s a subject for another blogpost.

Getting back to the point, I got an email from the Bernie 2016 campaign purporting to have been written by Bernie Sanders himself, and let’s just go with that, shall we? Here’s some of what Bernie had to say:

“One of the biggest mistakes President Obama made once he was in office was, after mobilizing millions of Americans during his brilliant 2008 campaign, to basically tell those supporters, ‘Thank you, I’m going to sit down with John Boehner and Mitch McConnell and take it from here.’
I will not make that mistake.
[…] If we’re going to accomplish what we want for this country, it won’t happen by negotiating with Mitch McConnell — it will only happen when millions of Americans get out and make their voices heard.”

It’s worth noting that POTUS Obama started out setting the tone his 1st term by declaring “I won” to Republican lawmakers during negotiations over the “stimulus” package of 2009. Negotiations between the Republicans and the Obama Administration have since been contentious and often unproductive, with the Republicans characterizing Obama and Democrats as having issued “my way or the highway” ultimatums to Republicans. Naturally, Democrats disagree with that characterization, and it’s worth a separate discussion, but in this blogpost I’d like to put a spotlight on Bernie’s words. So, here we have Presidential-hopeful Bernie Sanders promising not to negotiate with the Republicans. Lovely.

Bipartisanship be damned. That’s not right-wing Republican propaganda; that’s what he has to say for himself. I’ll go on to make the point that the Liberal definition of “bipartisan” is when Republicans do what Democrats want, and when Democrats do what Republicans want it’s called caving-in, regardless of whether both are part of a negotiated agreement. Happily, we wouldn’t have to deal with the headache of that cognitive dissonance if Badass Bernie becomes POTUS!